Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Lore

It sneaks up on you. Only moments ago I was a dashing young library clerk artist, doing interesting things about town, working part time at a library. Then one day I woke up to find I was Old Man Library himself."I remember you." The patrons say. "You were here when I was a kid."Yes, yes I was. Oh, the things I could tell you. In fact, I am going to tell you them now. All of them. Every single one! I am the fucking Ancient Mariner.It's all the this lore. When you work someplace a long time you collect so much lore you can no longer contain it. It starts spilling out of you. There is no wrong or right, funny or sad, interesting or tedious. Lore just crams into you and it no longer fits. If the shelves are too full then the books will start falling out. And if one book falls it can trigger a cascade. And so it is with me and all this lore. No one is safe, certainly not the youngster co-workers who've been here for a mere two or eight or twelve years (whatever, they are all new), nor the patrons, nor the random people one meets around town. The lore spills. The lore has to come out. There is no stopping it!

Not so terribly long ago all the library staff here were entirely exempt from all late fines.There was a round, short, bald man who used to do all the shelving in the kid's room. He was quiet and reserved and just a bit grumpy. Once he went into the break room and said to two of his longtime co-workers, to whom he had never said a cross word "What are you two bimbos talking about?"

An old timer once told me, at some long forgotten retirement party, that our original building was, at one point, 70 or 80 years ago, a pub, and that they could sometimes catch the smell of beer coming from the floor drains in the basement. We once had no check out limit whatsoever, and the first one we created in the computer age was 500, implemented entirely to deal with the deranged, obsessive check outs of one single patron. For months after the new rule she had a constantly rotating collection of 500 items out until she made one mistake returning them late. This broke her financially, and she never returned to the library again.We used to have small boating parties on the little wetlands pond out in the old break room's back yard.

The library adopted a hamster that was put through our book return. He was called Dewey and would sometimes run around the Circulation desk in a little hamster ball. Patrons used to bitterly complain about checking out videos that hadn't been rewound! The worst of these people would then heatedly tell us that they did not rewind their videos in protest.At least five couples I know of met working at our library and later married, all of them still together, but not a single one of these romances started in this century.Fascinating, banal, funny, pointless, meandering, odd, creaky, empty and appealing stories. It doesn't matter! They must be spoken. They are Old Man Library stories. Lore. Lo, a commandment. I gave you eight of them here. Do you think that will hold me?

Ha!As soon as I finish this up I'll go wandering. A curse is laid upon me. There must be some prospective listeners around. Everyone is a prospective listener. The shelves are full, the shelves are always full.

I would like you to take a nice break from touring and then publicize a really huge return concert, maybe solo acoustic. During that concert spend at least half the stage time chatting affably to the crowd, telling stories, making wry comments, you know the thing. When you play songs do them pretty similarly to how they are on the records.

Because if it were you pretending to be me, then, wait, um, you're right! There is no way to know if it was you pretending to be me after pretending to be Bob Dylan and Caravaggio and then pretending to be me OR me pretending to be you pretending to be Bob Dylan and Caravaggio (and anonymous) and you pretending to be me.

Wait! I've got it. It has to be you because it has a logo, your name (or, in this case, initials) and a date stamp. There is no way to fake any of that, I mean, not unless I were, like, a master hacker, which, I assure you, I am not! If I were my blog would be the homepage of a hundred million computers!

Anyway, so, now we know this is your comment, and you can relax then, knowing that you are you. Which, it turns out, You are.

If you were wondering, yes, you should comment. Not only does it remind me that I must write in intelligible English because someone is actually reading what I write, but it is also a pleasure for me since I am interested in anything you have to say.

I respond to pretty much every comment. It's like a free personalized blog post!

One last detail: If you are commenting on a post more than two weeks old I have to go in and approve it. It's sort of a spam protection device. Also, rarely, a comment will go to spam on its own. Give either of those a day or two and your comment will show up on the blog.

Not so entertaining sort of legal exclaimer that seems wise to post if you think about it

I in no way speak on behalf of or in any way for the Library I work for, though if they would like me to I am sure we can come to an agreement.

My blog is not written or worked on during paid time and if it ever appears to be that is only for narrative umph and to reflect on my thought processes and experience as things happened.

Things here are fictionalized and obscured sometimes, and though I stand behind my portrayl of the spirit and feel of things it would be wrong to ascribe too much to a specific Library, event, or person.